ECDL2010 – Day 2 (#ecdl2010)

Since it seems a few people read my post about day one of ECDL2010, I guess I’d better continue with day two!

Liina Munari’s keynote about digital libraries from the European Commission’s perspective provided delegates with an early morning shower of acronymns.  Amongst the funder-speak, however, there were a number of proposals from the forthcoming FP7 Call 6 funding round which are interesting from an archives and records perspective, including projects investigating cloud storage and the preservation of context, and on appraisal and selection using the ‘wisdom of crowds’. Also, the ‘Digital Single Market’ will include work on copyright, specifically the orphan works problem, which promises to be useful to the archives sector – Liina pointed out that the total size of the European Public Domain is smaller than the US equivalent because of the extended period of copyright protection available to works whose current copyright owners are unknown. But I do wish people would not use the ‘black hole’ description; its alarmist and inaccurate.  If we combine this twentieth century black hole (digitised orphan works) with the oft-quoted born-digital black hole, it seems a wonder we have any cultural heritage left in Europe at all.

After the opening keynote, I attended the stream on the Social Web/Web 2.0, where we were treated to three excellent papers on privacy-aware folksonomies, seamless web editing, and the automatic classification of social tags. The seamless web editor, seaweed, is of interest to me in a personal capacity, because of its WordPress plugin, which would essentially enable the user to add new posts or edit existing ones directly into a web browser without recourse to the cumbersome WordPress dashboard, and absent mindedly adding new pages instead of new posts (which is what I generally manage to do by mistake). I’m sure there are archives applications too, possibly for instance in terms of the user interface design for encouraging participation in archival description.  Privacy-aware folksonomies, a system to enable greater user control over tagging (with levels user only, friends, and tag provider), might have application in respect of some of the more sensitive archive content, such as mental health records perhaps.  The paper on the automatic classification of social tags will be of particular interest to records managers interested in the searchability and re-usability of folksonomies in record-keeping systems, as well as to archivists implementing tagging systems into the online catalogue or digital archives interfaces.

After lunch we had a poster and demo session.  Those which particularly caught my attention included a poster from the University of Oregon entitled ‘Creating a Flexible Preservation Infrastructure for Electronic Records’ and described as the ‘do-it’ solution to digital preservation in a small repository without any money.  Sounded familiar!  The authors, digital library expert Karen Estlund and University Archivist Heather Briston, described how they have made best use of existing infrastructure, such as share drives (for deposit) and the software package Archivists Toolkit for description.  Their approach is similar to the workflow I put in place for West Yorkshire Archive Service, except that the University are fortunate to be in a position to train staff to carry out some self-appraisal before deposit, which simplifies the process.  I was also interested (as someone who is never really sure why tagging is useful) in a poster ‘Exploring the Influence of Tagging Motivation on Tagging Behaviour’ which classified taggers into two groups, describers and categorisers, and in the demonstration of the OCRopodium project at King’s College London, exploring the use of optical character recognition (OCR) with typescript texts.

In the final session of the day, I was assigned to the stream on search in digital libraries, where papers explored the impact of the search interface on search tasks, relevance judgements, and search interface design.

Then there was the conference dinner…

Advertisement